Do you drive a practical car for practical daily tasks — and wish this practical car of yours ran on electricity? Then you may be one of the 16,000 people who’ve put down $99 towards a reservation for the 2011 Nissan Leaf, which will start delivering late this year. I am not one of these early adopters — but I was lucky enough to be one of the early test drivers of the Nissan Leaf, which made a visit to Santa Monica last week!

Now, I’m not a car fanatic. In fact I was car free for a few years, and can best be described as a reluctant and infrequent driver who only gets behind the wheel when all other greener modes are terribly inconvenient. So this won’t be a car geek-friendly, data-packed review — just my impressions jotted down for people who care less about how quickly a car goes from zero to 60 and more about how practical owning a electrical vehicle will be.

Practical is in fact how I would describe the Nissan Leaf — so long as you have a home garage. For Californian homeowners, the car may be extra practical; the emissions-free Leaf will be allowed in the carpool lane even after those yellow HOV-lane stickers expire for Priuses and other hybrids come 2011.

Plus, the Leaf travels about 100 miles on a full charge — but can get up to 138 in great weather conditions (or as low as 62 in horrible weather conditions) — making the Leaf better-suited to California’s temperate weather, which won’t require you to use up its energy to heat up the car.

How does the car drive? A lot like, um, other cars — except more quietly. I turned on the Leaf by pressing a switch (above), toggled the gear shift into reverse (below), navigated backwards without looking backwards by using the navigation camera feature, then shifted to drive and headed up Ocean in Santa Monica.

Since the car has no internal combustion engine — and no gears — the ride’s quieter and smoother. I didn’t do anything crazy with the car — just the usual turning and changing lanes one does in city traffic — and didn’t notice anything particularly different aside from the quiet. So for drivers who want to go electric without really feeling much of a change, the Leaf can be the solution.

The Leaf isn’t for me, however, because I’m a happy apartment dweller. To own a Leaf, you really need your own home and a garage — that you can outfit with a charging system (average cost $2200, of which $2000 is covered by federal funds). If totally empty, Leaf’s battery takes 8 hours to charge via a home charging system — or 18-20 hours using a portable trickle-charger that fits into any 3-prong plug. There are plans for some public quick-charging stations that’ll juice up electric cars in 30 minutes — but that infrastructure isn’t there yet. For now, Leaf owners would have to treat their cars like homing pigeons, making sure to come back home to charge up every night.

Of course, that is in fact, how most people live. Few people randomly head off to Vegas after work, Swingers-style — just as few SUV owners actually go offroading with any frequency. So if you own your own home and want to go about your practical daily life around town in an electric car — outfitted with seats made from PET bottles and bumpers made from old recycled bumpers — consider the Leaf. The car starts at $32,780 — but a $7500 federal tax credit and $5000 CARB credit for Californians sweeten the deal. Plus, electric cars generally have lower fuel and maintenance costs.

Whenever I write a car-related posts — even if about greener cars — I’m bombarded with emails and comments from car-free and car-lite people about how cars, even if greener, are not the solution. To those of you whose fingers are itching to leave those comments right now: I agree with you. Greener cars are at best an interim solution. And in fact, the Nissan Leaf commercial — which has Lance Armstrong praising the car because cyclists behind the Leaf don’t have to inhale exhaust — also oddly seems to agree with you, whether intentionally or not. Seriously — The ad cleverly makes me want to — bike, not drive.

In any case — Are you one of the people who’ve plunked down the $99 to reserve your Leaf? What made you take the plunge?

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